Call centers are increasingly used to provide telephone based customer service support of many types, including sales, technical support, and others. Calls to a telephone number supported through a call center are routed by call center application software to specific individuals, referred to as “agents”, that provide various kinds of information, sales support, and/or other types of support relevant to specific calls. Call center application software operates to route received calls to appropriate agents based on agent availability, and/or one or more items of information provided by the caller, such as the dialed number, and/or caller provided voice or key pad information indicating a requested service, product type, caller's native language, etc.
When an agent leaves his or her station or desk, that agent typically becomes unavailable to handle calls that are routed to that station or desk. The call center application software needs to be informed of such an event, in order to prevent calls being routed to a place where no agent is currently available. In some existing systems, when an agent is going to leave their desk, the agent must manually invoke a feature on their telephone equipment, such as a switch or button on a telephone headset, to inform the call center application software that they are becoming unavailable to receive calls. However, if an agent forgets to explicitly invoke such a manual feature, or for any reason fails to use it, that agent may still be considered available to receive a call. As a result, a call may still be forwarded to that agent's telephone equipment, and the call would not be picked up. After the call rings for some period of time, it may be forwarded back to a received call queue, and eventually routed to another agent. From the caller's perspective, such a sequence of events may be confusing, since they may hear an initial greeting message, then ringing as a result of the call being routed to the unavailable agent, then possibly another greeting message when the call is forwarded back to the received call queue, and then ringing again when the call is forwarded to another agent's desk. Other existing systems have required the agent to enter a special code into equipment at the agent's desk when they leave their work area. These approaches have proven inadequate in preventing calls from being routed to unavailable agents, since agents may not remember to manually indicate their absence, or enter a necessary feature code correctly.
For the above reasons it would be desirable to have a new system for providing an indication that a call center agent is unavailable to receive a call. The new system should avoid the need for an agent to manually invoke a headset feature such as a button or switch, but provide accurate indications of the agent's availability status. Additionally, the new system should require a minimal amount of call center agent training to be effective. It would further be advantageous for the new system to provide automatic recognition and log-in of an agent when they are ready to receive calls, and to digitally store call history information in a device that is portable to the agent.